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INDIANAPOLIS — Stephanie White knows exactly what it’s like to play in front of hometown fans.
The Fever coach, grew up in West Lebanon, was named Indiana Miss Basketball in 1995 while at Seeger High School and won a national championship at Purdue in 1999. To date, White’s Boilermakers are still the only Big Ten women’s basketball team to win a national title.
White played her rookie year in the WNBA for the Charlotte Sting, then returned home to Indiana as she was traded to the Fever ahead of their inaugural season in 2000.
And the first game White played in a Fever uniform was at her alma mater. The Fever played their first preseason game at Mackey Arena on May 20, 2000.
Now, one of White’s franchise players is getting the same treatment.
The Fever will play the Brazilian National Team at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City, the home of Caitlin Clark’s alma mater, on Sunday afternoon. Clark’s trip to Iowa marks the return of a player who not only changed the Hawkeyes’ fortunes but shook up women’s college basketball altogether.
“I remember it was so cool for me to be able to play for the Fever in Mackey Arena,” White said. “And I can imagine it’s going to be equally as cool for Caitlin to go back and play an exhibition, you know, in Iowa City, and in front of her Hawkeye fans.”
Tickets for the game sold out in under 45 minutes when they went on sale in February, and resale prices are going for nearly $450.
Over 15,000 fans will be screaming for the former two-time National Player of the Year, who captivated the state and nation as a Hawkeye. They’ll celebrate and get to thank Clark, who brought her hometown team to back-to-back national championship games in 2022 and ‘23 and left as the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer.
“I honestly haven’t been back to Iowa City a ton since I left a year ago,” Clark said. “I’ve only been back a couple times, once for a football game and once for my jersey retirement. So, it’ll be fun to get back there, see some of my former teammates, my friends that are there. A lot of my family will be coming.”
Sophie Cunningham, who played for Missouri from 2015-19 experienced that fandom firsthand, even before Clark played her first game in Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Cunningham’s Tigers headed to Iowa City for the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament in 2019, back when Megan Gustafson (now playing for the Las Vegas Aces) was leading the Hawkeyes as National Player of the Year.
The Missouri grad has mostly good memories of Iowa City — other than that’s where she ended her college career with a loss to Iowa in the second round.
“Just being back in the Midwest, the people are just good, good people,” Cunningham said. “And especially when you go to a college town like Iowa City, to get behind someone so great like Caitlin Clark, I just think there’s a lot of positive and excitement around women’s basketball, around Caitlin, around Iowa.”
“They ended my career there, my senior year at Mizzou, so I’m not salty or anything,” Cunningham joked.
The only problem with this game? The lack of air conditioning in Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
“I warned everybody, like, there’s no air conditioning in Carver-Hawkeye, and usually they don’t play basketball games there in May,” Clark said. “So hopefully, hopefully it stays a little cool in there. I don’t know what the humidity is looking like, but we’ll see how it goes. Might be a little toasty.”
The lack of A/C, especially on the second day of a back-to-back in the preseason, calls for a little extra planning on the coaching staff’s part.
“I didn’t know there’s no air conditioning,” White said. “So, yeah, so we’re going to have to work through that and make sure that you stay hydrated.”
At the end of the day, too, it’s still the preseason. White and her staff will be prioritizing working out lineups, rotations and most importantly, keeping their players healthy. Clark, despite being at her alma mater, won’t be playing 35 minutes. Not anywhere near that. Neither will other popular Fever players and projected starters like Kelsey Mitchell, Aliyah Boston or DeWanna Bonner.
“We know what the goal of preseason is,” White said. “Certainly, we want to win, but it’s to see a lot of different players to make sure that we can really evaluate, you know, to make sure that we can start to build our rotations, look at our depth, look at some different lineups. And so this is more of an evaluating kind of phase for us.
“Nobody’s gonna play a ton of minutes.”
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